


you’d know why i wanna get back soon

by makurophage



Category: Haikyuu!!
Genre: BoKuroo Week 2019, Fluff, Getting Together, M/M, Outer Space, sorta!
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-04-04
Updated: 2019-04-04
Packaged: 2020-01-04 14:36:49
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,402
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18345671
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/makurophage/pseuds/makurophage
Summary: “I don’t want drugs, dude,” is the first thing out of the guy’s mouth.”Neither do I,” Tetsurou says conversationally, seating himself in front of him. He sticks out a hand. “I’m Kuroo. You here by yourself?”





	you’d know why i wanna get back soon

The universe is not ready for Kuroo Tetsurou. It does not care for half-formed things, unyielding to the mellifluous hum of stars and indifferent to the shape of daybreak over the horizon, and it certainly does not care for the easy way five-year-old Tetsurou falls in love with everything he sets his eyes on.

 

The existence of something nearly-divine is just so that Tetsurou glows with the damning sun whenever he laughs. And he laughs. A lot, especially when the galactic putty in his child-hands jumps as if it’s been electrically shocked, spitting out blooms of blue-black bubbles like a living, suffocating thing. 

 

Tetsurou is twenty-three when he first whispers to Orion’s belt that he very much desires to be a human for a lifetime. That, for once, he would like to be held like a favourite plush toy, to be looked at with something more than jarringly empty cosmic eyes, to taste the cloying-sweet of what they call _nostalgia_ at the back of his throat, and then something bitter, something even more than that. Tetsurou’s mother laughs at him. She calls him an “unruly thing,” unbound to the laws of spacetime yet no closer to divinity than a directionless meteor, and kisses the back of his hand with a smile warmer than any sun.

 

So Tetsurou steels himself, with all the enthusiasm of a star reborn, and he goes.

  
  


-

  
  


The main thing that Tetsurou remembers is that he had left his home, which is somewhere else, and not here. Definitely not here, on this ten-thousand-acre tray of white sand left soaking too long in the cicada-infested morning, too noisy and too warm. The waves lap up the shore hungrily, as if daring Tetsurou to step closer, to lose himself in the sky’s pink reflection, and he’s reminded suddenly of the way something else used to sparkle - just like that - in his very own palms. 

 

Tetsurou pauses to look at his hands. They look like regular hands.

 

The sand is soft under his bare feet. There are crabs where he walks, tough and blue and half-buried, and there is the sun, and there are the picnics under it, and then there are  _ gulls. _

 

“THAT WAS  _ MY  _ SANDWICH,” someone is shouting, a little ways from the shade of a willow tree. The person’s silhouette flits about, chasing after a smaller, flying silhouette, furiously screaming and jumping before giving up completely and collapsing to the sand.

 

Tetsurou lights up.

 

The human sits up like a rocket as Tetsurou approaches, one unsteady foot in front of the other like he’s just learned how to walk, but he gets the hang of it quickly. Like a pendulum, the rhythm breaks when time rolls to a stop.

 

Golden eyes. Round, and alert like an owl’s, with flecks of white in a radial explosion around the irides. Tetsurou’s struck with a sudden pain in his chest, something longing, and remembers that he’s always liked looking at the shiny things, the things coloured very much like galaxies, and he wonders not for the last time if he really  _ is _ that far away from home.

 

“I don’t want drugs, dude,” is the first thing out of the guy’s mouth.

 

”Neither do I,” Tetsurou says conversationally, seating himself in front of him. He sticks out a hand. “I’m Kuroo. You here by yourself?”

 

“Bokuto.” Bokuto shakes firmly. There’s a smudge of wet sand across his cheek that distorts when he smiles, the quirk of his lips a little higher on one side than the other. “And not anymore.”

 

Tetsurou can’t look away from his eyes.

  
  


-

  
  


“This is awful,” Tetsurou chokes. “You’re awful for thinking of this.”

 

“You called me a genius three minutes ago.”

 

Bokuto Koutarou is fascinating. He plays volleyball, he cooks, he writes, lifts, walks dogs, avoids dentist appointments, and he does impulsive things like buzzing off most of his hair or taking baths fully-clothed. Tetsurou, as any good friend would do, accompanies him in all of these aforementioned activities and more, wondering if humans do indeed believe in a special place in the afterlife reserved for the kinds of people who willingly mix hot sauce with lime soda.

 

Fortunately, Bokuto shines so bright and so pertinent that Tetsurou doesn’t have to care for more than two seconds at a time.

 

“I think I’m gonna throw up.”

 

Tetsurou does, in fact, throw up. At the same time, he catches a stomach bug, and later that day has to be driven by Bokuto to the pharmacist to get prescribed an antibiotic for his troubles. 

 

The hot-sauce-lime-soda had tasted like angry playdough. Tetsurou can still taste it at the back of his throat.

 

Bokuto laughs at him until he cries, and then he cranks up the radio on his beat-up Mercedes and sings along, obnoxiously loudly, all the way back to his apartment.

  
  


-

  
  


“Dude, seriously? You’ve never played laser tag before?”

 

They’ve just finished dyeing Tetsurou’s hair a violent shade of red-purple, with a tasteful touch of neon-green at the tips, just because they can.

 

Bokuto’s own hair has grown back a little, but not enough to hold any gel. Tetsurou takes every chance he can to touch it because it is so  _ soft  _ without the terrible mass of hair products, puffing outward in all directions.

 

“Never.” Tetsurou towels off his hair with fervour. “I look like a can of Monster.”

 

“Bet you taste like one, too.”

 

Tetsurou puts down the towel. Eyes Bokuto, who’s started patting his hair down futilely in front of the mirror again, and snickers fondly.

 

“What?” Bokuto says, smiling at him in the reflection.

 

“Nothing. Let’s go tag some lasers.”

  
  


-

  
  


On Bokuto’s twenty-fourth birthday, Tetsurou sits him down on a grassy hill and tells him he’s from the stars.

 

“Huh,” Bokuto says, squinting into the indigo-splotched sky, “that makes sense.”

 

Tetsurou laughs because he doesn’t know how else to react. “What makes you say that?”

 

“Well,” Bokuto starts, turning to blink at him. “Sometimes, I catch you staring at your hands.” He folds his knees into his chest and rocks backward, silver-grey hair splaying over blue blades of grass. “And you get this faraway look in your eyes. And I had that thought, a lot of times, that you must’ve come from somewhere else.”

 

“I do that?” Tetsurou asks. He holds his hand up toward the sky and turns it to and about purposefully.

 

“Ah, but I didn’t think it’d be something  _ this  _ big.” Bokuto laughs. “Leave it to Kuroo Tetsurou to play fallen angel.”

 

“I’m not from the heavens, you clown,” Tetsurou chides, lying down to clasp hands with Bokuto’s. “I’m just from  _ there.  _ The stars, or the space between them.”

 

They let the silence stretch out along the imaginary dome that keeps the clouds from boiling over, Tetsurou with his swollen heart, Bokuto with his honey eyes. And they listen wordlessly: the cicadas are at it again, carrying with them the hum of a world not so different from Tetsurou’s own.

 

“But you know, right, Tetsu?” Bokuto says, quietly. “This is your home now, too.”

 

Something must lodge itself in Tetsurou’s throat, then, because it’s suddenly viscerally difficult to breathe, to think, and Tetsurou squeezes Bokuto’s hand with all the strength he can muster.

 

“Yeah,” he manages. “Yeah. Of course.”

 

Bokuto lets go of his hand to frame a section of the sky with his fingers. “So how long can you stay?”

 

“Long as you’ll have me.”

 

Something white streaks across the sky, quick as a blink.

 

“...My mom just waved at us.”

 

Bokuto jumps to his feet, tilting his head so far back that Tetsurou gets afraid that he’ll tip over. He cups his hands to his mouth and shouts up at the sky, hollering and waving his limbs all over the place. “Tetsu’s mom! I love you! Thank you for sending him down!”

 

Another white streak, this time in a shaky squiggle.

 

Bokuto gasps. “She heard me!”

 

Tetsurou laughs and pulls him down again, rolls until Bokuto’s sturdy body goes still underneath him, fatigued with the sharp feeling of living and seeing and breathing fresh air. He cups Bokuto’s face with his hands and touches their foreheads together gently, shakily, and then he kisses him, and he kisses him, and he stops to breathe for a quick second and then he kisses him again. 

 

In between the strands of Bokuto’s hair, Tetsurou remembers what it’s like to be made of new stars.

**Author's Note:**

> I’m very, very fond of this lmk what u think


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